Plenary Sessions

Posted April 8, 2014 by TEI

Plenary Session I: EEBO-TCP: The Next Five Years.

A panel discussion with Michael Witmore, Clark Hulse, Paul Schaffner, and Sebastian Rahtz about the public domain future of EEBO-TCP, the very large and comprehensive collection of TEI-encoded English books published before 1700.

Clark Hulse, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Executive Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, is an authority on Renaissance literature and visual culture. He is the author of Metamorphic Verse: the Elizabethan Minor Epic (1980) and Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend (2003). He curated an exhibition by that name at the Newberry Library, which traveled across 40 cities and included a Web version that won the Leab prize for an outstanding web exhibition by a research library and was named a “Milestone” by the NEH.

Sebastian Rahtz is the Director (Research) of Academic IT at Oxford. His stylesheets for converting TEI to anything else whatever are legendary. He played a key role in converting the EEBO-TCP SGML files into TEI P5, and he will be the spiritus rector of TEI Simple, a project in part motivated by the imminent release of EEBO-TCP files into the public domain and aiming at combining a tightly constrained schema with processing rules for displaying and querying texts. TEI Simple received a generous matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Paul Schaffner, Senior Associate Librarian of Digital Library Services at the University of Michigan, has for the last fifteen overseen the production of the EEBO-TCP corpus and has had considerable success in herding the infinitely varied cats of early modern print practice into the semblance of a consistently encoded corpus.

Michael Witmore is the director of the Folger Library . His books include Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (2007) and Shakespearean Metaphysics (2008). He directs the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists who use computers to assist in traditional humanities research; currently, they are mapping the prose genres of Early English Books Online using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics. Together with Jonathan Hope he is working on a book called Shakespeare by the Numbers and Other Tales from the Digital Frontier.

A conversation by and with Michael Furlough, the new executive director of the Hathi Trus, and Michael Sperberg-McQueen, the co-editor of the original TEI Guidelines. This event is shared with the Chicago DHCS Colloquium.